Do you want to be on time to school?

Would you love to be on time to classes, lectures, labs, student meetings, and extracurricular activities?

Whether you’re in high school, college, or university, or taking a continuing education course, it’s never too late to learn good time management skills.

This may come as a surprise, but learning how to arrive on time to school is just like learning any other skill.

First, you learn the basics.

Second, you practice what you’ve learned.

Third, you track your progress, learn from your mistakes, and improve your skills every day.

In this post, you’ll find five tips to help you be on time for school.

With focused intention and practical daily actions, you can learn how to better manage your time.

Even if you’re not currently taking classes or in school, you can learn something of value from these tips!

Use a planner to schedule classes and activities.

What’s the easiest way to keep track of classes and activities on any given day of the week?

Why, use a planner or calendar, of course!

Putting your academic and personal commitments in one place is a great way to get a bird’s eye view of your schedule.

You can use a paper planner or a digital calendar. The only caveat? Make sure the format is one you enjoy using.

Once you’ve selected your planner, the next step is to gather course syllabi, as well as emails, announcements, updates, and notices from student clubs, teams, and groups.

You’re going to carefully schedule every item of interest into your calendar, be it a class, lecture, laboratory, review session, study group, meeting, rehearsal, or practice.

Yes, this process will take time, but it must be done if you want an accurate view of your schedule and activities.

What happens if you receive new scheduling information during the school year?

Maybe an instructor announces an impromptu review session, you sign up for a team sport, or a professor reschedules a class.

The process couldn’t be simpler: simply add the new calendar item to your calendar immediately.

Don’t forget to remove or update older calendar entries, as necessary.

Schedule travel time into your schedule.

Okay, so you’ve added all activities into your planner and you know exactly what is taking place on any given day of the week.

What’s next? You’re now going to schedule travel time to each of your activities into your calendar.

This step ensures you will have sufficient time to travel to your destination.

If you’ve never scheduled travel time into your calendar, don’t worry.

All you have to do is work your way backwards in time.

Here’s a simple example for you: let’s say your first class of the day starts at 8:30 A.M.

You know it takes you thirty minutes to travel from your dormitory to class.

If we count backwards thirty minutes from 8:30 A.M., you should aim on leaving your residence at 8:00 A.M.

Are you unsure as to how long it actually takes you to travel from one location to another?

Maybe it’s the start of the semester, or you’ve never truly timed your school commute.

When in doubt, simply give yourself more time than you think you’ll need.

So, if you think you need 15 minutes to arrive to your class, give yourself thirty minutes to be safe.

If you think you only need 45 minutes, give yourself sixty minutes.

With practice, you’ll be able to fine-tune your travel times down to a handful of minutes.

Give yourself time to get ready in the morning.

Once you’ve figured out how long it will take you to travel to class, you’ll need to determine how many minutes you need to prepare yourself for the day.

The easiest way to do this is to create a list of must-do tasks, and then assign a certain amount of time for each.

Then, you can determine roughly how many minutes you’ll need to prepare in the morning.

What tasks do you need to complete in order to get ready for the day?

You may come up with a brief list and time estimates like the following:

Bathe – 10 minutes

Dress – 5 minutes

Groom – 5 minutes

Eat breakfast – 10 minutes

Gather personal and school belongings – 5 minutes

Now, if we add up everything, we find that’s a total of 35 minutes.

Sure, you *could* get ready in 35 minutes, but why stress yourself out?

To be on the safe side, we would probably want to round-up that number to 45 minutes so as to give you ample preparation time.

If you’re unsure as to how long your morning routine takes, you can’t go wrong giving yourself more time than you think you may need.

Think you can get ready in 15 minutes? Set a buffer for 30 minutes instead.

Is 30 minutes enough time to get ready? Give yourself a full hour to be safe.

With practice, you’ll determine just many minutes you’ll need to comfortably prepare yourself for the day.

Set alarms as necessary.

Need help staying on schedule?

You can’t go wrong setting reminder alarms for yourself on your phone, laptop, tablet, watch, or fitness tracker.

Sure, a wake up alarm (or two) is quite obvious, but how about setting other timely reminders for yourself?

All you need is a digital device…and your imagination!

Where does the time just seem to fly by in the morning or as you go through your A.M. routine?

Besides setting up a wake up alarm, you can set an alarm to let you know it’s time to eat breakfast, to gather your belongings, or to leave your home or dormitory.

Make traveling to school your top priority.

If you are truly serious about being punctual to each of your classes and activities, then you need to make arriving on time your number one priority.

There should be absolutely nothing else hindering your ability to be punctual. 

Here’s a few quick pointers to keep in mind:

Avoid any non-essential tasks.

This is not the time to start research on a project, have a long text conversation with a friend, watch a movie, or browse your favorite websites.

Make traveling to your destination, be it the classroom, laboratory, or lecture hall, your top priority for the moment.

Keep an eye out for time-wasters.

All those minutes stopping to chat with friends, taking the long-route to class, and checking your student mailbox can quickly add up!

Look at your routine to see where you might be inadvertently wasting time…without even realizing it.

Factor in other A.M. tasks.

If grabbing a breakfast sandwich or hot beverage, filling up your water bottle, or using the restroom are part of your regular pre-school routine, be sure to add adequate minutes to your schedule to account for this.

Again, it’s always better to overestimate your time, than not.

How about you? Which of these tips do you think you’re going to try out? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!